EDIT: Answered, thanks @montecarlo My MC dropped out of high school and got a job in a warehouse as a "human forklift." Pay was pretty good, especially with lots of overtime, but after more than a decade there (flexible, but he's a long-term employee) he got electrocuted by a piece of faulty machinery. The circuit was completed through his left arm and left leg, which left (left? c'mon) them both significantly weakened to where he couldn't do the "lift and carry" job anymore and wasn't really qualified for anything else. What percentage of his pay (either 40 hour weeks or including history of overtime) could he expect to get on the high end (good union representation) or low end (company lawyers/doctors screwed him)? "Well, it's only the left side, so you're only 50% disabled..." I don't need massive details, but money is going to be an ongoing issue for him and I want something that's not going to prompt immediate eye-roll from readers who have experienced similar.
I hope we have some lawyers in the house. My understanding is workers comp is pretty cut and dried unless the plaintiff can prove gross negligence on the part of the employer. California Workers' Comp Settlement Chart 2022/2023 (atticus.com) I have no idea if that source is true, but if so your character would get 2/3rd of the normal weekly pay, minimum of 240 and maximum of 435. It also looks like the duration of the payments is something that is highly variable - from as little as 4 weeks to as much as 17 years.
Excellent, thanks! I had done a bunch of googling but for some reason never could find anything with cut and dried numbers. That gives him a maximum disability of something like $22,000/year, which is definitely little enough to force him to seek his other employment (psychic/scammer). Count this one solved!
I'm more interested in the plot device of being electrocuted. Does this normally happen? My understanding is that there are two types of 'electrocutions'. One is where you get severe burns and therefore physical damage, and the other is muscle contraction caused by the frequency of which the current alternates between positive and negative. Your muscles 'respond' to electrical signals of a certain frequency range, the same way they would respond to the electrical signals created by your brain. And yes, the alternating frequency of our wall plugs (60 HZ if you're in the USA) happens to be within that range, which is why you never ever stick your hands there. The latter type doesn't really weaken you. It's just that, for the duration of the electrocution, you can't command your muscles, but as soon as that goes away, control is back and nothing is wrong with your muscles. I have personal experience of this, I touched a shady electrical appliance as a kid and my muscles contracted like springs, and upon the RCD tripping the breaker to protect me, that tension was released and I jumped all the way up to the ceiling. It was bloody incredible. If the RCD did not detect the current not returning to neutral, the electricity would mess with the muscles in my heart, and I would die. On that note, the way electricity does physically damage you is by heating up your muscle tissue since it provides electrical resistance to the current running through it, which means that heat is generated due to the restricted flow of energy (the 'extra' energy has to go somewhere). But if you're lucky enough to pull away before your heart stops, that heat doesn't have long enough time to penetrate all the way through. You will get super severe burns if the voltage is high enough, but those will stay where you touched the electricity. Why? Because if you hold the electricity long enough to heat up the whole path it runs through to the point where it causes damage, you will die. On top of that, there is this weird phenomenon alternating current has where the energy tends to go to the surface area of the conductor it runs through. The higher the voltage, the more it goes through the surface rather than the inside of the conductor, which means that if the voltage was high enough to cause such damage in your character, it wouldn't go through his muscles anyways! I can't see how this scenario is plausible. On one hand, the voltage needs to be very high to cause this sort of damage to your character. On the other hand, if the voltage is so high, it goes through the surface of his arms and legs. The only way is if the voltage is so high, it instantly heats up the path and burns his legs and arms so severely, they become so burned to the point where they never heal back to the way they were. But again, for such damage to happen, the voltage would need to be at such a level, it would basically kill him. And he would deal with far more than just 'weakened muscles'. Also, if the machine he touched ran on direct current rather than alternating current, then that significantly changes everything I just said, even if it's high voltage. P.S. I'm not an electrical engineer but being in the computer field I naturally know a bit about how electricity works, and why it harms you. But that doesn't make me well informed, so I could be wrong. These are just my thoughts. Actual experts of electricity, feel free to correct me.
Nerve Damage From Electric Shock: What You Need To Know (electrocuted.com) Hard to take ambulance chasers at face value. This seems to back it up: Electric shock: Effects on body, symptoms, first aid, and more (medicalnewstoday.com) Maybe our medical expert knows: calling @Toxnurse
Judging from the article, it's probably a lot more plausible to say that he sustained long-term injuries from the electrical shock that indirectly prevent him from carrying the fork-lifting work. There is a useful table that lists the long-term effect of severe electrocution cases but it doesn't mention "weakened" muscles like I suspected. But it does list a bunch of other things OP can use. Like, pain, which makes sense. If he gets deep burns and severe tissue damage that would last in the long term, then lifting would cause quite a bit of pain. Good idea to call toxnurse, we'll have to see what she says about this.
@ps102, I don't know the mechanics, but I'm basing that part of the character on a friend of mine (who I've lost touch with) who was a human forklift in a warehouse. He was operating a high-voltage electrical lift thingie with bad insulation and ended up with the disability (roughly) that I've described. He had lightning-bolt shaped scars on his arm and leg and severe nerve damage that rendered him barely able to lift a cup of coffee from the table to his mouth (corresponding it seems to @montecarlo's link about motor nerve damage. The company was able to find him something else to do so he never went on disability insurance (plus a different state, Illinois), but I'm not going to let that get in the way of a good inciting incident (my friend's heart didn't stop, my MC's did. This is crucial to the story but not the original question.) But sincerely thank you for the input and questions, I'd much rather see them here than from an agent, editor, or even a beta reader
Sorry, but I'll have to let you down on this one. I've never seen anyone who was electrocuted, so I'd have to do the same research y'all are doing. Obviously you're going to get burns and neuro damage, but you've already figured that out.
That makes much more sense. I just read your original post with the 'weakened arms' and I imagined that his arm, without physical damage, was simply weaker after the incident. But if there were burns of this degree, oh yeah, definitely makes more sense. In my post, I was just not certain whether someone being electrocuted with this amount of damage would actually survive to struggle with it. Then again, maybe your friend was electrocuted with super high voltage DC, which wouldn't stop his heart but would still have the potential to cause severe burns in the case of a closed circuit where there is super high voltage (which is the case here). Also, I think the reason Toxnurse didn't see anyone who was electrocuted was because its pretty rare for electricity to do anything bad to you nowadays with the amount of protections we have. It's a pretty lethal force and so we have made sure that it won't kill us That said, it can still happen, so I don't want anyone to go testing their luck. So, don't test your luck
